demands raised in the Transitional Programme. Groups such as the Workers Socialist League, for example, who commendably broke from the WRP for its inability to grasp the significance of the Programme, can be seen on demonstrations as diverse as those on abortion to unemployment distributing leaflets which carry a whole string of such demands.
hile 'formally, adhering to the programme repoeted shows that they have not assimilated the method behind it. As was pointed out earlier, socialists do not choose method' is to be of people, strugaleel The struggle itself helps to heighten their consciousness and prepare them for yet further demands.
In this way, the Transitional Programme can be compared to a 'tool kit'. The art is to select the correct Itool! at any given stage of the Naturally, to a certain extent, be a matter of empirical judgement there is a constant inter-relation between trying out a demand and modifying it in the light of experience. It is only by finding the right demand to fit a given situation that it is possible to engage people in struggle to modify their own consciousness.
This fact is 'misunderstood' by left groups like the WSL who try to impose on struggles demands - or strings of demands - unrelated to the consciousness of those forces beginning to get involved in action. A recent example of this was the response of the left to the attack on abortion rights by the government - under pressure from the anti - abortion forces in SPUC. This attack on abortion rights was an attack upon the real, if limited, gains that had been won under the 1967 Act.
While sections of the left responded to this attack, they utterly failed to understand the nature of the struggle and the demands needed to involve wide layers of women (and men) in action. Groups like the WSL stood on the sidelines distributing propaganda telling women to link up their struggles with that of workers. in the factories. Even groups like the IMG - who at least participated in the NAC* - tried to tie the campaign to the coat-tails of the struggle against the cut-backs in the NHS. Presumably, women might still be denied the right to use them because of the legal attacks on that right.
What all these groups did was to impose on NAC demands too far in advance of the consciousness of those layers active in it. These layers were quite willing to fight to deferd the right to abortion but not yet willing - at this stage - to link the struggle with one opposing cuts on the NHS or other issues. The raising of these other issues was not, in itself, wrong. It was just a sectanian misgrasp of the transitional method which aims to relate to people & involve them in mass action. As a result of these groups! sectarian antics - particularly the IMG - NAC has declined in both support & Reformist ?
The reason why such groups adopt such a sectarian stance is that they fear concentrating on democratic and other demands - like the 'right to choosel - can lead in a reformist irection. After all, they might be won. Suc muttitude, widespread among. many young ra icals, is to completely misgrasp the method of the Transitional Programme.
Socialists do not start out by elaborating a series of demands that cannot be 'met! under capitalism. If that were true, it would mean refusing to support struggles for higher pay or better conditions which can indeed be won. They start out by elaborating a series of demands in the interests of working people and their allies and struggling for them. In the process, some will be won and some will not. As Trotsky put it, the "realisability or unrealisability is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces which can be decided only by the struggle".
The real point for socialists is that in the process of struggle masses of people can go through an experience that will change their consciousness about the system and educate them in class-struggle methods to reach their goals. It is through struggle that people learn to place reliance on their own power, to develop self-confidence and enlarge their understanding of the system that will prepare them for further struggles.
What the sectarians do not grasp is that the development of consciousness is not a simple 'act! but a continuing process around varying issues in which struggles over a given demand -can play an inter-connecting role. The fact
that workers are encouraged to fight around transitional demands does not mean that soc¡alists ignore, for example, struggles over a straight wage claim. On the contrary, fighting for the latter often prepares the psychology of wide layers to understand the former.
REE RBORTION GN DEMAND mobilisation of the masses...". The reason why Trotsky emphasised this was that he was aware that changing consciousness does not take place through literary ideas alone... Changing consciousness can only take place through the self-experience masses tend to go through in struggling for demands which they consider relevent to their needs.
This is where those groups - such as the WSL among others - make a mistake when they counterpose to the struggle for abortion rights struggles around a whole string of other demands. They see changing people's consciousness as merely repeating, parrotfashion, a series of demands learned from the Transitional Programme. The art of this programme is not, however, to raise demands
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their terrain of operation but, unfortunately, The do intervenansitional method is to bel